


Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

by razboinicul_iernii



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Crack, Gen, Humor, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 13:01:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16576997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/razboinicul_iernii/pseuds/razboinicul_iernii
Summary: "The worst has come to pass," Thor said solemnly."I figured the worst was, you know, genocide, but this seems kind of shitty too," Rocket said, trying to placate a still screaming Groot-thing."The Gauntlet has eliminated half of all civilized life in the universe by changing it to uncivilized life," Thor said."Oh this is so stupid," Natasha muttered, drawing a hand over her face.Steve had to agree but it was slightly better than what they'd been anticipating. Maybe half of the planet was now a turtle, or a bird, or a hedgehog. But it was better than death.Probably.or: The monkey's paw version of Thanos's plan or something idk.





	Nature Red in Tooth and Claw

**Author's Note:**

> This has been waiting around on my hard drive for me to add three measly paragraphs to since Infinity War was released. I'm not an efficient person.

Steve stumbled towards Thanos, ready to help end what Thor had started, when the alien snapped his fingers. His heart stopped when he saw it, dread settling like a weight in the pit of his stomach. Thor fell back a pace or two, his opponent suddenly gone. "What did he do?" Steve managed to demand but the horror on Thor's face told him everything.   
  
Thanos had accomplished his goal, and now half the universe would perish.  
  
"Steve?"  
  
He turned at the confused tone in Bucky's voice, already trying to figure out how to explain that they'd failed. But when he looked at Bucky, he knew something was wrong immediately. And-no. This couldn't be happening. But why not? Who was he to think half the universe being wiped out of existence wouldn't touch him personally? Wouldn't take someone so important to him? He watched, completely helpless as Bucky's body began to crumble, to disintegrate, to...  
  
To change?   
  
The flurry of ash and dust drifted to the forest floor and Bucky was gone. His gun clattered to the ground, and beside it there was a turtle. A turtle that looked up at him, blinked once, opened its mouth and made a noise like air being let out of a bike tire.   
  
There was no way. Natasha took a step closer, face reflecting the deep confusion that Steve felt. He looked at her and she looked at him, shook her head once as if to deny what they both thought might have just happened. What they couldn't allow themselves to believe had just happened. Steve knelt to the ground and looked at the turtle whose mouth was still gaping open. Even though it felt utterly ridiculous, he asked, "Bucky?"  
  
The turle's feet moved. Slowly. So slowly. But it moved towards Steve. A wild animal wouldn't do that. He glanced up at Natasha and she whispered some dazed curse in Russian. Steve held out his hand to the turtle. It crawled closer and then-  
  
"Ow!" Steve drew his hand back immediately after the turtle bit him. It stomped its front feet madly before pawing in the dirt. "What the hell!" Steve cried in spite of everything, clutching his hand to his chest.  
  
"He's writing something," Natasha said, pointing at the ground.   
  
Steve looked down and sure enough, with great effort, the turtle had carved out a demand in the dirt with its stubby foot:   
  
F I X M E  
  
"Jesus, Bucky," Steve breathed, at a complete loss on where to even begin. "I...I don't-" The turtle bit him again and Steve pushed him back by his shell. "I'm not a miracle worker! Hold on and let me think!" Bucky hissed back in response.   
  
"Thanos was supposed to eliminate half the universe," Natasha said, unable to comprehend why Bucky was now a turtle. She glanced around. As Steve focused on the confused and alarmed voices around him, he began to realize that Bucky had not been the only one to suffer such a strange fate.   
  
First he heard the raccoon. "Groot! Oh jeez, what happened to you?! You're hideous!" Steve looked there and Rocket's little paws were sunk into the fur on his head, yanking a little. There was something in front of him that looked like a cross between a bear and a rodent. Its fur was black and its mouth hung open in a scream, sharp little teeth bared.   
  
"Uh, guys? There's...a seagull tangled up in the harness of Sam's wings but no sign of Sam..." Rhodey called from somewhere to Steve's right. He hadn't noticed until then that he'd heard a seagull cawing almost this whole time. He'd been a little distracted, after all.  
  
Okoye appeared suddenly, something cupped in her hands. With a fierce and angry look, she marched right up to Steve, shoved her cupped hands into Steve's face, and demanded, "How is Wakanda supposed to go on when her king has been turned into a hedgehog?" Steve's eyes nearly crossed as he focused on the little prickly ball in Okoye's hands. It covered its eyes with its tiny hands in a bizarrely human gesture of embarrassment.   
  
"The worst has come to pass," Thor said solemnly.   
  
"I figured the worst was, you know, genocide, but this seems kind of shitty too," Rocket said, trying to placate a still screaming Groot-thing.  
  
"The Gauntlet has eliminated half of all civilized life in the universe by changing it to uncivilized life," Thor said.   
  
"Oh this is so stupid," Natasha muttered, drawing a hand over her face.   
  
Steve had to agree but it was slightly better than what they'd been anticipating. Maybe half of the planet was now a turtle, or a bird, or a hedgehog. But it was better than death.   
  
Probably.  
  
He flinched away when something smacked into his ankle, hard. He looked down and the tortoise-Bucky-was slamming his shell into Steve's leg. "This is going to take some time, Bucky." That didn't appease his friend at all, apparently. Bucky continued to slam his shell into Steve. "What do you want me to do?" Steve asked, at a complete loss. They had to find Thanos, that much was certain, but where did they even begin? There were still a lot of people to catalog the well-being of.   
  
He watched as Bucky moved painfully slowly, stubby front feet planted into the side of Steve's boot until he was standing precariously on his back legs.   
  
"He probably wants you to pick him up," Natasha said. "It can't feel nice, looking at everyone's feet."  
  
"Oh," Steve said, feeling like an idiot for failing to notice. He bent down, carefully took the tortoise by the sides, and lifted him. "Better?" Steve asked and Bucky let out a quiet hiss. But there was no further wriggling or biting. "I'll take it as a yes."  
  
"We must comb the battlefields," Okoye told him. The hedgehog in her hands-T'Challa-nodded in agreement. It should have been impossible for a hedgehog to look poised and regal, but this one did. "Very carefully. It seems as though anyone could have turned into any creature, no matter how small."  
  
"Right," Steve agreed. "It might work best if we split up, cover as much ground as we can." They did just that. Sometimes the animals were very easy to spot. Natasha found Wanda fairly quickly, a bright red parrot nuzzling the corpse of Vision. Some others were less fortunate, like one of the poor souls who'd been turned into a flurry of ladybugs. Still others were having a hard time being found because they'd been turned into big, fierce creatures like lions or tigers that no one wanted to go near at first. It was a very difficult day for everyone, and Steve allowed himself to find a little relief as he and the others finally headed back to the palace.   
  
Shuri had been working all day to figure out if the process could be reversed without having to find Thanos. Bruce had joined her but they both came up short so far. The rest of them passed in and out of the workspace every few hours to check on them and their progress. Shuri's lab, which she normally kept clean and in perfect condition, was now a complete zoo, and a mess as a result. Wanda had taken to plucking out her own feathers for some reason so they were scattered all over the place. Groot-who was a Tasmanian devil, apparently-was pooping whenever and wherever he felt like. Rocket explained that Groot, in his natural state, didn't have a digestive tract. He worked more like a plant and the only wastes he expelled were gases. So he didn't know what he was doing. Shuri threatened to put him in a diaper but every time she said it, Groot screamed and she didn't want to find out how bad it hurt to be bitten by him.   
  
She'd rigged up a decent way for the animals to communicate with them, which was a bit of a relief. Steve imagined the hardest part about being trapped as an animal had to be the inability to speak, to tell others what you thought or felt or needed. Sam was really adept at it because of his beak. He typed very quickly on the holographic keyboard. Bucky, on the other hand, was impossibly slow at first. In testing his ability with the keyboard, he'd mispelled things so badly that the words came out as gibberish, which lead to a fit of stamping feet on Bucky's part. Sam laughed at that, his gull voice echoing obnoxiously in the lab. Bucky bit his tail and then Sam retaliated by shitting on him. Bucky opened his mouth and hissed for a minute straight after that, legs stomping as fast as they could go but Sam had taken off to the other side of the lab then. Bucky must've known he had no hope of catching him because he didn't even try, just looked to Shuri with the most affronted face she'd ever seen on a tortoise.   
  
"I will kill Thanos with my own bare hands for turning my lab into a toilet," Shuri whispered under her breath as she tried to work.   
  
Steve figured it was probably pretty unbearable. Solving the problem might be impossible anyway, so that just added insult to injury. "Why don't you take a break?" he suggested from his place at one of the sinks set against the wall. He was scrubbing seagull shit off of a tortoise shell. Less than twelve hours ago he had been fighting a giant purple alien to the death. There was no predicting the future and Steve tried not to bother speculating anymore.   
  
Shuri sighed, rubbing her temples. "Well, I wanted to try to finish this last bit of work here," she said.   
  
Steve set Bucky back on the ground and walked over to the console that Shuri was working at. He recognized the double-helix of someone's DNA but everything else on the screen was gibberish to him. "It'll be here when you get back. Why don't we get some dinner?" He didn't want her to end up burned out on something she couldn't fix.  
  
She opened her mouth and Steve got the distinct sense she was going to say no. Another scream from Groot as he abruptly pooped had her shoving away from her console and instead saying, "Yes, absolutely."   
  
Steve followed her out of the lab. Sam came after, perching himself on his shoulder.   
  
He'd grown up as a poor kid in a poor time. Tony Stark's Tower had seemed opulent and extravagant to him the first time he saw it. It was nothing compared with the royal living quarters of Wakanda's King and his family. The kitchen they went to was staffed with six different chefs-two of which were animals right now, an owl and a horse. The other four still chose to work even though T'Challa had dictated through Shuri's keyboard that they were permitted to leave due to the bizarre situation.   
  
The cooks could make just about anything you could dream of, and very well. Steve knew it might have been a waste on his part to not try out another new Wakandan dish as he had the last few times he'd been here. But right now he wanted some comfort food. He didn't miss the look of disappointment that briefly passed over the chef's face as Steve asked for a few hot dogs and fries. He half expected them to not even have them but there must have been a package somewhere in one of the freezers because he got them.   
  
Shuri smiled at his plate as she led them to the dining room. It was one of many, this one on the second floor. There was a dais outside that was technically on ground level, sitting on top of a rocky slope. They ate there because Shuri's mother, the queen, hadn't been spared, but she was too large to move freely indoors.   
  
"Good evening mother!" Shuri called with surprising ease despite how bizarre it had to be to direct that statement at an elephant.   
  
Queen Ramonda trumpeted before typing out a response on the holographic keyboard in front of her. A computerized voice read from the nearest overhead speakers: "Perhaps for you! While I have great respect for animal life, it is a little humiliating to become one!"   
  
"I'm working as hard as I can," Shuri said to reassure her. Ramonda's trunk patted her affectionately on the head, a show of her thanks.   
  
"I know, daughter," came the voice from the speakers. "I will try to be more patient."  
  
Steve took a place at the table. Okoye was already there with a meal of her own, some kind of stew and a plate of vegetables and-  
  
He did a doubletake. Bugs. Dead bugs. He wasn't an expert on Wakandan delicacies, but he was pretty sure he'd never seen anyone eat insects here. And he knew maybe it was narrow-minded of him to be disgusted by a food that people ate in other parts of the world but he wrinkled his nose without thinking.   
  
Okoye must've seen him because she quickly said, "This is _not_ for me." She nodded her head towards T'Challa, who Steve had initially missed, too distracted by bugs at the dinner table.   
  
T'Challa rolled out of his defensive little ball long enough to scamper around a tablet left out on the table. There was nothing on it but a fullscreen keyboard. He smacked at it with his tiny hands before a computerized voice read, "It is NOT for me, either."  
  
"My king, you _must_ eat a well-balanced meal, whatever body you are in," Okoye argued.  
  
More scampering. "I will NOT eat BUGS."  
  
Okoye took a breath and rubbed her eyes. "Bast help me, why did you do this," she muttered to herself.  
  
"She probably wanted a crunchy snack," Shuri said, smiling at T'Challa. She lifted a forkful of her own meal towards her mouth but was interrupted by a smack to the back of her head from an elephant trunk. "Mother!"   
  
"NO blasphemy at the dinner table," the computer read after a few quick jabs of Ramonda's trunk to the holographic display.   
  
"Okay okay!" Shuri said, raising her hands in surrender. She glanced sidelong at T'Challa, who was smiling. It looked really, really weird, so Steve went back to his meal before he insulted the king by accident. It probably hurt to be hit by an elephant, after all.  
  
They ate in silence for just a few minutes. It was very noticeable because the past few hours had been nothing but chaos and noise. So this was almost surreal. Steve ate his hot dogs and fries, chucking a few of the latter to the side for Sam to peck at. Sam fluttered to the table and tapped away at T'Challa's tablet. "Mustard."  
  
"I'm not putting mustard on my fries," Steve said. He ate ketchup and got hell for it but whatever.   
  
More pecking. "Asshole."   
  
"You can share with T'Challa then," Steve answered with a shrug. T'Challa's little hands worked quickly, trying to gather as many pieces of fruits and vegetables in his little arms as he could. It was like something out of a cartoon and Steve couldn't help but smile that time. Then he let out a little noise of shock when something smacked into his leg. Shuri giggled a bit at the way he jumped. When he looked down, there was Bucky, rearing back to deliver another headbutt to his leg. Steve winced, a little ashamed that he'd forgotten to grab him on the way out of the lab. He bent over and set him on the table. It seemed rude, even though there was already a hedgehog with a plate of bugs and a seagull hanging out. But T'Challa was royalty, and Sam was...Sam. So Steve felt pressured to say, "I hope you don't mind. He likes to be tall."  
  
Okoye shook her head. Shuri smiled warmly. A computer voice said, "I mind." And Bucky hissed at Sam before stomping around to look at Steve's plate.   
  
Steve glanced at Bucky then at his food. "Do uh...do turtles eat fries and hot dogs?"  
  
Bucky dragged himself over to the tablet and typed away with his blunt little feet. Due to how slow he moved, the tablet spoke after each word instead of the whole sentence. "This. One. Does."  
  
Shuri, however, was scrolling through her phone, apparently already researching an answer. "He's a tortoise, Captain," she corrected him first.   
  
Steve shrugged. "Didn't know there was a difference." Growing up in New York City hadn't exactly allowed for a lot of animal encounters that didn't involve rats or pigeons.   
  
"Well, there is," Shuri said, eyes still on her phone. Looking at her like that reminded him of Tony and he wondered not for the first time since the Snap where he was, if he was alive, and still human. "Anyway, it seems the diet for a tortoise doesn't really allow for too much in the way of greasy foods like fries and processed meat. It might make him sick. It would probably be best if he ate some fruits or vegetables."  
  
Bucky swiped madly at the tablet. Madly for a tortoise, anyway. "Some. Friend. You. ARE."  
  
Shuri didn't bat an eye. "Oh, you watch yourself. I took those words out of your head, I can put new ones in that'll make you twerk like Nicki Minaj." Bucky's mouth fell open at that while Sam laughed his obnoxious seagull laugh. T'Challa showed some sympathy, all too familiar with Shuri's threats. He gave up one of his cherry tomatoes, rolling it at Bucky.   
  
Steve went back to eating and maybe he felt a little guilty. Bucky and T'Challa and Ramonda all had to watch them eat food they couldn't. Sam being a seagull at least gave him some versatility, even if fries probably weren't the ideal diet for him. God only knew what Rocket was feeding Groot. And what about that guy who'd turned into a bunch of ladybugs? Steve tried not to think about it. Then a cherry tomato rolled into his field of vision and he glanced at it as he ate. Bucky scrambled for it like it had personally offended him and when he tried to take a bite, Steve saw why.   
  
His beaky mouth couldn't bite into it, and it rolled away again. Sam started up one of his guffawing laughs and Steve threw a french fry at his head. "Knock it off already," he said. He reached for the errant tomato and sunk his thumbnail into it before tearing it in half. He tried to quarter it but it just kind of turned to a slush of juicy innards and skin and he left the mess on the table for Bucky to eat. A blunt turtle nose bumped into the back of his hand in thanks before going to town. Steve felt bad but he kind of wanted to wash his hands now. Would that be insulting to Bucky?   
  
He didn't want to take the risk right now, especially after he'd just forgotten him in the lab. So he dropped that hand into his lap, making sure to not use it for the rest of his meal, trying to enjoy this brief moment of peace and quiet. Soon they would go back to throwing themselves into finding a solution, even if that solution might require an intergalactic search for a giant purple alien and his magic glove. The thought had him once again wondering about Tony, where he might've ended up in that donut space-ship. Things had gone sour between them and he felt guilty about never patching things up before all this happened. So he hoped at the very least that Tony was okay, wherever he was.  
  
 _~some large amount of lightyears away,_ _on planet Titan_ _~_  
  
"You're gonna be okay," Tony insisted, catching Peter as he stumbled.   
  
"I don't wanna go," Peter babbled again and again, wrenching Tony's heart right out of his chest. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. Things weren't supposed to end like this. Thanos couldn't-  
  
"It's gonna be fine, listen-" Tony continued, unable to accept anything else.   
  
Peter fell heavily to the ground, Tony going with him to his knees. The kid swallowed hard, watering eyes searching for Tony's, and he managed in a cracked, weak voice, "I'm sorry."  
  
"No, you don't-" Tony reached out to sit him up, but it was too later. The light was dimming in his eyes and Tony was helpless to stop it. He held Peter, just some dumb kid who was trying to help, as his body crumbled to pieces, to-  
  
To about a thousand fucking spiders.  
  
"Oh Jesus, oh God!" Tony cried, shooting up to his feet. Somewhere behind him a bear-like creature bellowed where Drax had been before. Tony was a little too focused on the ungodly creatures swarming all over them that might be Peter Parker somehow and God did he wipe them away and squash them or not? "What is happening?!" He looked to the others for help, but suddenly there were no others. Just another weird alien creature with a beak and no feathers where Mantis had been. A chittering raccoon where Peter Quill had been. And a meditative baboon wearing a red cape.   
  
Tony made a noise, but tried not to open his mouth to let it out, afraid that a spider might crawl in it.  
  
  
  


 


End file.
